How To Reduce Bounce Rate: The Definitive Guide

November 14, 2015 by Nedim Talović

When someone visits your site and then leave without further interactions, your bounce rate goes higher.

The definition of bounce rate from Google Analytics: bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). In this blog post, I’ll show you few steps that will help you to decrease bounce rate of a website.

There are a lot of different explanations of potentially low bounce rate on your page, including:

High bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean you have website design issues, or that your page content doesn’t match. Sometimes visitor finds exactly what he needs on landing page, especially if the page is a blog.

Why is bounce rate so important?

It’s a signal that your visitors are possibly unsatisfied. Since Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, sites with lower bounce rates, will rank higher in Google search results.

What’s more, reducing bounce rate will statistically increase your chances for conversions, weather if it’s aemail subscription, making an order, or any other goal.

So, what can I do to reduce bounce rate?

Implement the following steps, and bounce rate for your site should start to get lower.

#1 Improve Website’s Speed

Set this as your top priority, not only because of bounce rate but for yours site performances generally.

Folks with slow websites are gambling with the possibility of earning this “Slow to load” warning.

To get the idea how much space you can save, look at the chart referring to one of the most popular Javascript libraries jQuery (your developer is probably using it):

Instead of loading file with 288.44 kB size, your server will load 96.00 kB. In other words, you are saving 188.44 kB. Let’s say you are hitting 100.000 visits per month. In that case, you’ll get to save 18.84 GB per month.

You’ll get a zipped file which you should extract to /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

Login into WordPress Admin panel and choose Plugins from the menu.

The next step is to activate your plugin from the list of available plugins. Simply click on the Activate.

Voilà! Your plugin has been successfully activated.

However, it’s not enabled yet. This might seem weird, but it’s nothing to worry about. You are just one step from turning on your caching plugin. The activated plugin actually means it’s ready for configuration.

To configure, click at “plugin admin page”:

In settings page you will have several tabs like:

Easy

Advanced

CDN

Contents

Preload

Plugins

Debug

I’m not going to configure the plugin on advanced level. Click on the Easy tab, choose Caching on (Recommended), and then hit Update Status.

WP Super Cache has Test Cache feature allowing you to be sure if your caching plugin works. Hit the button and see if you get this green message:

Congrats! Your plugin has been successfully configured and enabled. Leveraging can start.

Another brilliant plugin is WP Rocket. Even though it’s commercial, we strongly recommend you to consider it. It’s fast, simple and easy to implement.

Step 5: Optimize images

Use CSS instead of images whenever it’s applicable. Still, if images are must-have, go for optimization. This will provide you significant byte savings and boost your site’s speed.

If the text is too wide, your visitors will get into troubles. It will be hard to figure it out where the line starts or where it ends. On the other hand, if the text is too narrow, your reader’s eyes will quickly get tired.

The Baymard Institute use 516 pixels wide container. They claim that the ideal line length is in the range between 50 and 60 characters per line.

However, some resources suggest that up to 75 characters are acceptable.

Personally, I wouldn’t go for more than 75 – 80 characters. Please, keep in mind that line length is directly related to font size.

#4 Optimize Call-To-Action

Absolutely crucial for the bounce rate is making CTA relevant to the landing page. It’s a critical moment when visitor decides between conversion and bounce.

You need to be cautious. A wrong decision can cost you thousands of dollars.

Another inevitable thing to consider is a guiding visitor to your CTA. Reduce distractions like unnecessary pop-ups and banners. Otherwise, visitors will get frustrated and bounce.

Always remember famous statement: measuring is everything in digital marketing.

Yandex Scroll Map is a free tool which tells you how much users scroll in average and where their focus is.

Positioning CTA is important as much as its design. Place it into an area where people’s eyes are mostly engaging. You don’t want to put it somewhere on the bottom, where maybe 3% visitors will see it and 1% of them will click.

Let’s wrap up this subject in simple conclusion: To reduce the bounce rate, make your CTA simple, clear and visible all the time.

#5 Run A/B Testings

Comparing an original page to alternative, in order to see which performs or converts better, is called A/B or split testing.

During the testing period, two versions of one page are shown to visitors. The idea is to check out what version brings better results.

“We didn’t fundamentally change any functionality or page flows at this point. One thing we did change was the login screen after lengthy split testing; the changes resulted in a 50% decrease in abandonment of the site at this page.”

How to run your own A/B testing experiment?

You can carry out an experiment in two ways:

to pay commercial tools for handling tests or

to use free tools

Google Analytics and its feature called Content Experiments is the most popular one and personally my favorite. Let’s walk through simple GA example.

Since the goal is reducing bounce rate, choose Bounces as your objective.

Sometimes, you’ll be interested in improving some other metrics. It’s even possible to create an objective for custom metrics. For example, if you’ve implemented event tracking you can go for improving engagements such as:

Video play

Social sharing buttons

Scrolling, etc.

Notice that I’ve applied the experiment for 100% of traffic. This way all visitors will participate in the experiment.

If you think your experiment is too risky, choose the lower percentage, but you’ll need more time to get statistically significant results.

Setting 2 weeks as a minimum time the experiment will run means that Google Analytics won’t declare a winner before that time expires.

Shorter time allows you getting faster results. However, due the low traffic or different patterns, sometimes it takes up to three months for declaring a winner.

Certainly, you can set statistical significance to 95.5%, but that will require more time to get the results. It’s totally up to you.

Step 2 – Original Page is a page where might be a potential space for improvements. It’s your current active page, like product overview.

Maybe green color scheme would bring more conversions instead of currently blue one?

For that matter, you need to make a variation page. Google Analytics will compare it to the original one.

It’s allowed adding up to 35 variations, but one or two variations will be just enough. It’s not like that you’re Amazon where you can test multiple variations.

Step 3 – Nothing will work if the code isn’t inserted.

You can do it manually or send it to your developer.

I’ll click on Manually insert the code and get the following:

Google Analytics tracking code has to be installed both on original and variation page, while experiment code needs to be inserted only in your original page (after head tag).

Step 4 – Once I’ve inserted the code I’ll review:

and start the experiment. This is the message you want:

Good luck with your tests.

Conclusion

In the end, see bounce rate as an indicator for tracking relationship with your audience. It sends you a wide range of signals. Maybe too wide, if the web site isn’t optimized.

Tips from this article, helps you to narrow that range, and make bounce rate truly useful. The more steps you apply, the more focus you’ll get.

If you have already taken all the actions, but you’re still struggling with high bounce rate, then it’s most likely the content you need to consider.

What’s your bounce rate? How do you deal with high bounce rate? Share your experience.

Comments

Vrisha MalanOctober 22, 2016

Yes, this is a serious problem. I am also facing this. I am at a 65% bounce rate. I look at my site as easy to understand, informative and to the point. I’m unquestionably not an SEO expert, so it’s a bit tough for me to navigate through all of this.

A quick question is the Click on an Affiliate Link or Adsense Link considered as a Bounce? If yes, then it’s cool because many bloggers their goal is to make money and usually the money comes through Clicks (Cost Per Click and Cost Per Sale)!! may you guys explain, please?

Anyways, thank you for the guidance and can you make advice about how to improve this factor. Great article full of helpful information.